I recorded this at the Society of Editors conference in November, so forgive my tardiness. This is Donald Martin, a representative of UK training organisation NCTJ talking about the results of a survey they and partners PTC, BJTC and Skillset conducted into employer and university perceptions of skills needed by journalists…

We’ve grown up with news being free, whether our parents paid for it or we stumbled across it on the Internet as young teens. In college, many of us found stacks of papers free in dining halls and student unions as publishers showered schools in hopes of building devoted young readers.

To where from here? I think the industry can survive only if big guns — the Tribune Co., owner of the Los Angeles Times and the Chicago Tribune, which has filed for bankruptcy reorganization; The New York Times; The Washington Post; Murdoch; McClatchy; and Gannett — manage to collude. They, as a cartel, must demand that we pay for news, be it digital or print. I think a system where subscribers get Sunday print delivered combined with unlimited digital usage is a likely model.

So, if you are training tomorrow’s journalists, why bother with your own print edition? While I haven’t seen a formal content analysis, my impression is that college newspapers have evolved about as much as their grown-up siblings (not much). Given the amount of time and energy it takes to put out a printed publication on a regular basis, journalism programs could benefit by focusing their students’ energies toward innovations in online journalism, instead of putting a paper out.

NEW YORK (AdAge.com) — News on the web has a future — and not just for sites that don’t pay their bloggers, like The Huffington Post, but for cost-intensive operations such as The New York Times, too.

The report concludes that once NYT.com starts generating 1.3 billion page views a month, it could succeed as a web-only product.

That’s the conclusion of a report released Tuesday, titled “Size Doesn’t Matter,” by online media-research company ContentNext. The report looks at sites ranging from those that are independently run on a low budget, including Drudge Report and the Daily Kos, to giants like CNN Digital Network and Google News.

“Small website operations can be self-sustaining,” writes the report’s author, ContentNext Research Director Lauren Rich Fine, “but life is easier at the mega traffic sites.”